Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Social Media News for church and ministry leaders. I’m Natchi Lazarus. This is the show where we bring you 5 important social media news that you need to know for this week, in less than 5 minutes!

Let’s get started.

1.The 1st news item is from Instagram.

Instagram announces that the videos that you upload on
IGTV can now be previewed in their regular news feed. Which means people can,
as they’re scrolling through Instagram posts, see your IGTV previews. So they
will see a short clip and there will be a facility for them to click and watch
the full video on IGTV. We tested it out. It’s pretty cool. It looks nice. If
you know how to work it, it still needs a little bit of adjustment, because you
need to know how to make that work for you. But I think this news is quite
exciting and Instagram is thinking how to get more people onto their IGTV
platform, which is great.

2.The next big news is from LinkedIn.

LinkedIn announced that they are going to start their Live
video broadcast service. So that is a big news for all the people out there who
are using videos on social media. And you as a ministry, if you have been using
live videos, and if your audience are on Linkedin, not many ministries or
churches have their audience on Linkedin, but there are a few ministries and
nonprofits for whom LinkedIn is still a relevant platform, if you are one of
them, then you could make use of this service as they rollout the live video
features, in the days to come.

3.The third news item is from Pinterest.

Pinterest announces that it is bringing full automation to
their Shop the Look feature, which is basically an ecommerce feature that
allows you to buy a product that you see in a picture. This feature was
introduced in 2017, but before this news, it involved a human intervention. But
now using artificial intelligence, Pinterest says, this process is fully
automated.

4.The fourth use items is from Spotify.

Spotify is a music streaming services company, which is
now getting serious about podcasting. So they have acquired 2 big podcasting
apps and startups and they’re adding it to their services because they are
realizing that podcasting is the future and their audiences are consuming so
much podcast on their platform. So they want to provide a better service. If
you’re using podcast for your ministry then this is something that you want to
make a note of.

5.The final news items is about YouTube.

A recent study finds that YouTube is the most trusted
brand among millennials, for the very first time. It beats brands like Apple
and Netflix to become the most trusted brand!

That’s all we have for you this week. I hope this was useful.

Thank you for joining me. Have a wonderful week.

Do leave your comments, questions, feedback and reviews. I will see you next week!

Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches and Ministries. You can subscribe to Natchi’s email newsletter by clicking here.